Burnie Babies and Other Adventures Raising Kids

While cleaning our basement the other day I happened upon the inevitable tray of Beanie Babies stacked in a corner. The question occurred to me: What obligation does a parent have to keep such things? We cannot begin to conceive the memories those toys have for our children. As parents we see them as stuffed animals. But what do they mean to the kids? Our children competed in ownership of those toys. Each just "had to have" the giraffe or donkey or elephant. Now our Beanie Babies sit in the basement where no one pays attention to them. But the memories are there. Somewhere.

We know this much: for our children one of the favorite games was hiding Beanie Babies around the house. One of those toys died a horrible death after being hidden on top of a lamp in the living room. Its little guts melted and the skin burned through. It is now part of a permanent display at our local fire department. Guess that one is called a Burnie Baby.

We also used to hide candy for the kids to find on Easter morning. Every year there would be a chocolate egg or 5 that would go unfound. My wife and I would be cleaning the house a few months down the road and say, "Oh look! A malted milk egg! The kids missed this one!" We moved out of that house 11 years ago. I'm sure the current owners are still finding candy in nooks and crannies.

Our other favorite game was bouncing balls down the basement steps. Sometimes we'd pour the whole bucket of super-rubberized balls at once and they'd scatter across the basement floor, causing a cascade of laughter and chaos. I'm sure we never found all of those rubber balls either. Once in a while in cleaning the back corners or inside a closet door a ball will show up, dusty and forlorn. It must wonder why we forgot it so long ago.

When play moved outside the kids got into some fearsome trouble at times. One story involves my son playing with a neighbor up in the apple tree. While climbing from branch to branch he slipped and would have fallen completely out of the tree had is Oshkosh B'Gosh coveralls not hooked a tree branch. My wife had to go out and unlatch the poor boy.

The natural inventiveness of children is what gets them into trouble most of the time. So does the need to exert their budding personalities. Our neighbors' youngest child went missing for a couple hours one day. The neighborhood went on full alert. We searched garages and walked a perimeter searching for the little boy. He was eventually found crouching in the window well of his own house. When asked why he would not answer when we were all calling his name, he responded, "I wanted to hide." His parents just shook their heads. The Prodigal Son returns.

This same child ironically delighted in being tied up, duct-taped and otherwise turned into a prisoner by the other kids. I found the boy in our attic strapped round the chest in duct tape while the other children rammed around the house laughing. He was never in real danger, but there was apparently a recognition by this kid and our children's play group that his personality was something of a sport to enjoy.

The back seat of the car is where the real dynamics of childhood relationships get played out. The inevitable fight would break out over one child looking out the others' window. Or an imaginary line between the car seats would get crossed, resulting in flaring tempers. The kids ultimately evolved a system of storing their toys and possessions that over the years became casual but highly involved. That kept the peace.

My daughter in particular was significantly rebellious in her back seat behavior. Bored and hungry during a trip back from grandma's one day, she chomped a line of teeth marks into the vinyl material of the car door. Those marks stood as a testament to her incisive personality until the car was sold. One has to wonder what the new owners made of them.

She had been acting up one day, tormenting her brother with looks and taunts when I stared into the rear view and said, "Emily, if you don't straighten up back there, I'm going to make some rules."

"But daddy," she said sweetly, learning forward to stare me down in the mirror. "I will break the rules." She was only 3 at the time. I pulled the car over in frustration and lifted her out of the car seat. The stated intent was to make her walk home with me the last two blocks as punishment. "Where are we going?" she asked with annoying innocence. My wife sat holding her hand over her mouth in a grimace of laughter and trepidation. "Hoo, boy," she blurted. "We're in for trouble with this one." Indeed, my daughter's pattern of independence and fearsome self-definition has continued to manifest itself through her teenage years. When it comes to boyfriends, she had this to say in response to our concerns that she was running all over the city, suburbs and countryside making friends: "I will not let distance define who I date or hang out with." So she'll drive an hour to spend three hours with a boy she likes.

My son was always a hard-working, excellent student who had a lot of friends, not all of whom knew how to behave or showed good judgment. When they were fifth-graders they somehow got their hands on a supply of fireworks and were about to shoot them off in our back yard when I came upstairs from the basement to find one of the boys about to light a Roman candle while holding the stick on which the firework was mounted between his thighs. "Alex," I said quietly. "Are you trying to blow your ****s off?"

He looked up at me as the thought of losing his jewels registered in his budding adolescent brain, then parted his thighs and let the firework fall to the ground.

For all these known experiences, there are no doubt countless incidents to which we parents were not witnesses. We know a few of the stories. Like the time my son and his friends nearly burned their tree house to the ground with gasoline. The crazy bike stunts. Wrestling in the swimming pool. Toilet papering houses in high school. And now college. We're lucky any of them lived to make it there.

But we have a basement full of mementos to start the stories in case they ever slow down enough to share them.